5 Design Trends in 2015 You Could Use For Inspiration

Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works. – Steve Jobs

There’s no clear scientific formula to beautiful design as it’s undoubtedly considered more of an art than a science. Strangely enough, there are many recognizable patterns which seem to reappear time and again in successful works around the web.

Luckily for us, these trends aren’t limited to websites. They can (and will be) applied to almost every type of design out there, including infographics.

The only problem is that too many articles around the web will tell you what is cool in web design right now – and finding the right inspiration will overwhelm even the most willing beginners. That’s why we talked with See Mei Chow, Piktochart’s talented Head of Design to ask her for advice on different design trends you could apply to your first infographic. These 5 trends are suitable for designers of any skill, but most importantly, they are perfect for beginners.

Let’s take a closer look at 5 design trends that are ruling 2015 and will continue to grow towards next year.

Cinematic Design (a.k.a make it big)

In the past, scrolling web pages used to be insanely hard. Users had to move their mouse to the right edge of the screen, and then click and drag the scrollbar. Now, specially on mobile and tablets, scrolling has become much easier. This allowed designers to kill the ‘above the fold’ concept, and start using enormous and beautiful photography. This leads to a design trend popularised by Medium — full-screen image titles, with no content visible until you start scrolling.

How To Apply It In Your Infographic?

This is a great idea if you want to start your infographic with a strong title or statement that quickly grabs the reader’s attention. If you use your infographic for marketing or promotional activities, then this is a great idea. A couple of great places to look for free pictures you could use are StockSnap, Pexels, and Unsplash.

We’ve been applying these tips ourselves when designing visuals that go with our social media updates or presentations people use when training others on Piktochart. Take a look:

Keep it Simple

As the cinematic trend has been exploding over the past 12 months, a complementary trend has emerged alongside it: keep it as simple as possible. This entails following Mies van der Rohe’s principle, less is more. Remove all non-essential visual elements (like the navigation), and focus attention on one element (a title, an image or a call to action).

How To Apply It In Your Infographic?

See Mei Chow suggests you should combine these two trends – a fantastic picture with a minimal sentence – for maximum impact. Try picking a great photograph from the sources above, and selecting an extremely short (1 to 3 words) sentence to describe your infographic. If you are worried about providing little information, remember it’s only for attention grabbing – you’ll offer almost all the content once the user starts scrolling.

As a matter of fact, Piktochart will soon release a handful of cinematic and simple designs you could use as templates!

We use this principle when designing our email header banners, just like the one below (which has been created in Piktochart).

Material Design

A few months ago, Google released their design guidelines – Material Design. It’s an evergreen document outlining the recent design guidelines Google suggests everyone to follow when designing for the web and mobile. It uses surfaces, shadow and elevation to suggest what can be touched, what can move and what is important.

How To Apply It In Your Infographic?

Applying Material Design to your infographic means being really eye-catchy, using sharper colors and being more daring. Also, utilizing shadows as elevations to mark what is important. Your goal should be to move towards simplicity by utilizing flat design concepts and line icons with flat colors. This means moving away from gradients and textures. You’ll find a ton of fantastic Material Design examples on the Material Design Blog.

Combining Line & Flat Design

“One of the biggest trends going on right now is the usage of line with flat designs”, explains See Mei. This style leaves behind gradients, textures and shadows, and embraces solid colors, clean layouts and sharp typography. This design is bold, eye-catching and beautiful. We’ve been utilizing this style in a lot of our new templates. As a matter of fact, our 3rd Anniversary Infographic was inspired by line design + flat design!

How To Apply It In Your Infographic?

First, you should start by picking plain color surfaces as the background for your infographics. Slight texture are allowed, but stay away from gradients and effects that suggest volume, like shadows. Second, you should aim to use heavy lines as section and content dividers. Finally, you should pick bold icons with a strong presence. Piktochart’s built-in icon picker is the perfect place to find these type of icons.

The Geometric Influence

This approach revolves around utilizing geometric concepts and shapes as the forefront elements of your design. The trend is based upon using symbols and icons based on patterns, symmetric design and perfect geometrical shapes. These shapes are used as navigation elements, framing components or just as a way to draw users’ attention to a specific call-to-action.

How To Apply It In Your Infographic?

In the past, geometry was extremely popular as a background element. Now, we suggest you use it to frame images, or direct the users attention towards a specific element, button or relevant stat.

Material design is something very interesting… Many app development companies have started adopting Material design… Thanks for sharing these design trends… Let us see what trends emerge in 2016… You may also like this infographic, the history of web design http://www.infographicscoop.com/web-design-trends-infographics/